There’s a famous saying in the sciences: “All models are wrong, some are useful.” Many of our physics models have been “wrong” historically, but yet they descri

There’s a famous saying in the sciences: “All models are wrong, some are useful.” Many of our physics models have been “wrong” historically, but yet they describe the world well-enough to be useful in making very good predictions. Newtonian physics is a perfect example of this - it tells an incomplete story of reality, but it’s still extremely useful in making predictions about how the world works. The reproducibility crisis across the social sciences (and sometimes even in biology and medicine and - hot take - machine learning) is evidence that many of these models are both wrong AND useless for prediction, as opposed to just being incomplete.